Tragically, Being Hip Means Your Sales Suck!

David Farrell

Record companies in Canada blew their marketing wads last year preaching to hip, tech-savy, smart-phone slinging males with R&R attitudes, iTune accounts and Limewire collections – and in doing so missed their target audience by a D-cup and a country mile.

How else does one compute the statistical evidence provided by Nielsen data released yesterday for album consumption in Canada?

Record companies large and small blew their budgets and their jockey shorts hustling Guns N’ Roses, Kiss,Metallica and any number of nubile sexy thingies to audiences that mostly yawned in their collective faces. And, by the time the dust settled, it had become all too obvious that voluptuous women and mainstream crooners paid the rent, salaries, and expenses for record company executives and marketing mavens–leaving the hip and undiscovered …well, hip-and still undiscovered.

The year 2009 will go down as the year older women and suburban men slapped smart and smarmy white males in the face.

Ginette Reno, Susan Boyle and mainstream bucks like Michael Buble and Johnny Reid proved  that being hip ain’t worth a shit, and Bob Lefsetz’s vision of what is just isn’t.

Like it or not, Lady Gaga pays the bills.

Ginette Reno maybe over the hill at age 64, but she  can still outsell U2, Kiss, Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Pearl Jam, Bon Jovi and The Beatles.

To add insult to injury, the buxom dame outsells international competitors by a ratio of 13 to 1. Ginette Reno’s album sales are overwhelmingly sold in Quebec. The Beatles on down get to peddle their wares from the Artic Circle to the Great Lakes and then on west to the Pacific Ocean.   French, female, a golden gal, La Reno continues to beat them hands down selling her albums largely from one province. Go figure!

This year the Grammys scotched Susan Boyle, and Michael Buble. Like Boyle, like Buble, the overlooked, under-appreciated bubbas of this world weren’t scouring off-beat record shops to find albums by Fuck Off, Fuck You or Get Fucked!

Nor where they seeking out repackages by disco divas, hermaphrodites or teen sleazes. No, these mortgage-approved,  white-collar drones instead were shopping at Costco, HMV and Future Shop. Credit cards in hand, they purchased albums by  (giggle!) Justin Biber, (snicker) blind opera star Andrea Bocelli -and (who the fuck ?) Fred Pellerin.

Yes, Fred Pellerin!

There isn’t a single top-priority Canadian act in the top 30 and yet Quebec artists keeping popping up in the national top 10 like tits at a Gene Simmons press party.

For unknown reasons, head-office Canada has always preferred to fan an unknown from someplace in English Canada than catapult a dead-certainty outside of Quebec. This cultural paralysis has created a legacy of unexplored opportunity and failed exploitation.

To emphasize the point, Montreal’s Beau Dommage was the first act in Canada to ship gold, Montreal-based Harmonium the first to go double-platinum, and Montreal-born Corey Hart the first Canadian act to achieve a million-seller in Canada – with First Offence, his debut album that contained his global hit, ‘Sunglasses At Night’.

Beyond Borders
Universal cleans up in the market shares, and proving that hip is out, the big gains in album sales in 2009 are attributable to the Jazz, Country and Classical genres – all of which are under-served in the national radio mix. After a fallow period, Deep Catalogue is showing itself to have legs, pumping up the overall volume of Canada’s album sales last year.

Further analysis to follow; meantime, we welcome criticism, strokes and or corrections on any and all of the above.